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Monthly Archives: April 2012

A feature that excites me personally a lot is support for external download managers. You will find Aria2 and SteadyFlow support in the preferences under Extensions. Once activated, the Save button in download prompts offloads downloads instead of saving the file internally. This means you can stop worrying if Midori keeps run all the time, you may get faster downloads than WebKit can provide and in the case of SteadyFlow a GTK+ UI with support for Ayatana indicators. Do note currently only Aria2 recognizes Cookies from the browser, and if a particular download doesn’t work, use Save As instead.

There have been some erroneously blocked links with Adblock. This has been solved by introducing an automated whitelist for actively opened pages. The whitelist may be extended for other uses cases in the future. There’ve also been bug fixes around the Block Image feature which broke in certain cases.

Despite known problems with GTK+3 Midori supports overlays for the statusbar and inline find bar with GTK+ 3.2. Optionally there’s also support for Granite, an extension library written in Vala, which among other things provides pop-overs and a new notebook widget. At the moment it’s still under development and it’s not recommended for packaging just yet. But you can try it with –enable-granite –enable-gtk3.

The Windows build got some love, opening of downloads now falls back to an ‘Open With’ dialog automatically and opening of images works well. Application associations such as the text editor for viewing source code also give a more sensible choice. And the experimental Windows build is pretty solid at this point. You get full Asian font support (Unicode) and HTML5 video support.

The about:version page Midori has to provide information useful for debugging is now also listing other special pages, such as the newly added about:geolocation to test geo location support if it’s enabled in WebKit. In contrast to some websites out there, it will give accurate results not affected by browser discrimination.

Uses of sqlite, which is relevant for for history, bookmarks and cookies have been tweaked. WAL mode is now used if the system supports it. In short, it is faster.

Smaller issues also got attention, like internal javascript improvements which could break Google apps among others, there was a case where form history could break a website and invalid characters in filenames are handled better.

Last but not least, you can right-click Back and Forward buttons now, to get a menu with the 10 last or next pages. So if there’s a website re-directing you when you hit Back, you can now right-click Back and open it manually.

Some of you may already have anticipated this move. Midori is a web browser, based on WebKitGTK+. Postler is a mail client and also mostly a thin wrapper around WebKit. There’s been a feed reeder extension for Midori for a while which also uses WebKit. The natural evolutionary step is to merge these pieces of code. The few C pieces of Midori will be rewritten in Vala.

Enter Meiruborosuaa, from Japanese メイル for Email and ブラウザー for Web Browser. The name was chosen because it’s easier to pronounce than Midori and reflects the new goals. Work has already started in a private branch and will be moved to the official repository in the following week. Rest assured, existing Midori extensions will continue to work. The new split view where you can see your tabs on the left, your mail boxes on the right and the message or website in the middle however required API additions that extensions don’t use yet.